The Darkling Thrush

By Thomas Hardy 1840–1928 Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-grey,

And Winter's dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be

The Century's corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among

The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings

Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.

ABOUT THIS POEM

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Poet Thomas Hardy 1840–1928

POET’S REGION England

SCHOOL / PERIOD Victorian

Subjects Winter, Nature, Landscapes & Pastorals, Social Commentaries, Living, Arts & Sciences, Animals

Holidays New Year

Poetic Terms Rhymed Stanza, Common Measure, Alliteration, Elegy

More about this poem

Thomas Hardy was both a great poet and a great novelist. Although, as Laurence Lerner and John Holstrom point out in Thomas Hardy and His Readers, Hardy "was a classic of the English novel long before he died," he was not celebrated as a poet of the very first rank until after his death. Helmut E. Gerber's brief synopsis, in the first volume of Thomas Hardy: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings about Him, gives some indication . . .

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